Why AI researchers like video games – Economist

May 18, 2017

We were mentioned in The Economist:

Like displaying curiosity and delaying rewards, transferring learning from one task to another is something humans do effortlessly but machines struggle to manage. Here again, games are playing an important role in research. For example, Julian Togelius of New York University has organized a challenge called the General Video Game AI Competition. Entrants must create a single program that can play, with reasonable competence, ten different video games that neither it nor its programmers have come across. This requires the software to master many skills—planning, exploration, decision-making and so on—and apply them to problems it has not previously encountered.